Navy directed-energy programme moves on
The US armed forces' vision of fielding lasers that can shoot down missiles, microwaves that squirt pulses of energy to disable enemy electronics and guns that fire projectiles huge distances using electro-magnetic (EM) forces is moving closer to reality, according to the US Navy's manager for directed energy (DE), Capt Roger McGinnis.
[Jane's Defence Weekly - first posted to http://jdw.janes.com – 27 August 2004]

Somewhere at theier homepage they say that they want to launch electromagnetically from the moon. They might have worked on it allready but I didn't find results when I looked for them at their site last time.

It looks a like another kind of the concept to catch a payload from an airplane by a cable coming down from a spacecraft diving into the atmosphere from orbit and then returning to space.

Yeah, the concept is to catch a payload by a cable suspended down from a spacecraft. To catch a payload, the point is that the spacecraft is not on an orbit but virtually hanging in some altitude above a given place of Earth´s surface.